Arguably the blackkest comedy of the year, BLACKKKLANSMAN is also one of the best films of the year, period.
Beginning with a foul racist rant upholding the Protestant Anglo Saxon Purity policy of the Ku Klux Klan, BLACKKKLANSMAN tells the extraordinary true story of Ron Stallworth, who, in the 1970s, becomes The first African-American detective on The Colorado Springs Police Department, and resolves to make a name for himself and a difference in his community by infiltrating and exposing the Ku Klux Klan.
If this scenario seems too ridiculous to be true, consider grown men who dress up in pointy headed shrouds and burn crosses and think that one race is superior to another, in a country that boasts it is a land of opportunity, that has a Bill of Rights and a justice system that has the motto “and justice for all.”
This is the truly ludicrous legacy that still plays out today as we remember the atrocity perpetrated in Charlottesville, Virginia a year ago, an incident of infamy that footnotes this film.
Director Spike Lee spikes this far out barrage against the Far Right with sardonic, somewhat satirical flourish, fleshing out the movie with film references beginning with Birth of a Nation and Gone With The Wind and then full throttling into the Blaxploitation pictures of the Seventies, the era in which BLACKKKLANSMAN is set.
Hotter than Shaft, cooler than Cleopatra Jones, BLACKKKLANSMAN is Spike Lee giving the bird with the absurd, pulling off a frightfully funny film about a frighteningly real malignancy that riddles the United States with a canker of which the Klan is but one tumour.
BLACKKKLANSMAN is incomparably cast with John David Washington as Ron Stallworth, parleying his character’s Black pride with the pragmatism of being a policeman, a profession vilified by African Americans as the personification of racists pigs. It’s a striking and stalwart performance.
As his colleague, Flip Zimmerman, who masquerades as Stallworth in face to face meetings with the Fascists, Adam Driver gives a career best as the cop whose experiences with the members of The Hate Group also prompt him to examine his own relationship to his Jewish heritage.
BLACKKKLANSMAN features Harry Belafonte, himself an icon of the civil rights movement, in the pivotal role of Jerome Turner, recounting his first-person recollections of the lynching of Jesse Washington he witnessed as a young man. Bracing to hear and beautifully conveyed by Belafonte, the scenes offer a palpable reminder of the unspeakable horrors perpetrated by KKK.
The participation of Alec Baldwin as the racist ranter that kicks off BLACKKKLANSMAN carries a deliberate and delicious dictum from the director in the light of Baldwin’s recent impressions of Donald Trump.
In truth, there isn’t a dud performance in BLACKKKLANSMAN, nor a dud beat. In some sort of cinematic alchemy, Spike Lee has managed to make a film that is effectively entertaining and enlightening, coruscating and condemnatory, celebratory and cautionary.
BLACKKKLANSMAN – infiltrate hate and annihilate.